Save old Dr. Twaddel, the minister, and the village doctor, we had no neighbours, and consequently few visitors.
My mother spoke seldom of our father; but we could see by the current of her thoughts that they rarely ran on aught else than his memory. Hopes she had none, save those that were centred on us.
So, for seven years, the blameless tenor of our even life rolled on.
My mother's quiet gentleness and soft ladylike manner, together with her kindness to the poor of the village, the sick and dying, among whom she shared her widow's mite—the mite that in heaven shall become a talent of price,—caused her to be tenderly loved by all; and I repent me now, even after the long lapse of many stirring years, that in her latter days, the tears that rolled over her pale and fast-furrowing cheeks were caused by my errors, and it may be, my selfish and resentful pride.
CHAPTER II.
THE MINISTER.
Time sped the faster that it sped unmarked; and now I had reached that most important and unpleasant period of a boy's life, when the necessity for increased action arrives; and a period it too generally proves to all the delusions, the dreams, and the charms of childhood—I mean the time when grave old gentlemen begin to question us categorically, and, as it often seems, somewhat intrusively, upon our future plans, and to impress upon us the necessity of "doing something for ourselves."
My mother, who had frequently spoken with me on this subject, and seen with regret how my thoughts turned towards the army, of which she had now a terror, as being the too probable means of separating us for ever, resolved to consult Dr. Twaddel, the minister, on the subject; and in Scotland, "the minister" is always esteemed the second person in the parish; so to this consultation I consented, with some outward reluctance and considerable mental repugnance.
Our minister was a good kind of man in his own quiet way, though his excessive views of uprightness and propriety, together with certain severe lectures he had read me for making midnight raids into his orchard, for shooting one of his hens with a penny cannon on the King's birthday (the 4th of June), and for burning "Johnnie Wilkes" in effigy in the churchyard, had made him somewhat of a bugbear to me. He made indifferent sermons, but capital whisky negus, and could take a comfortable share thereof, though eschewing all hearty mirth or levity, and adopting in his deportment that somewhat too solemn gravity and cold, hard external rigidity, with which the mass of the Scottish Lowlanders are tinged, and which makes their most sunny summer Sunday a day of gloom and silence. Like the majority of the northern clergy, he was a humble, meek, and well-meaning man, who, though he preached incessantly against the nothingness of this world and the good things thereof, had taken especial care to provide himself with a remarkably well-dowered helpmate. Without brilliance of talent, he possessed just heart enough to find favour with the poor of his flock; and head enough to accomplish his Sunday task, by emitting a hazy sermon on some old scriptural text, which no one cared a jot about. Yet he was a good man withal, our old parish minister.
I remember, on one occasion, while he was commencing his sermon in the gloomy little village church, an old man propping himself on a staff entered the aisle, and being a stranger, he looked wearily and wistfully round for a seat. Being clad in rather dilapidated garments, and having a canvas wallet for alms, such as meal and broken bread, no attention was paid to him, either by the pew-openers or the congregation. The old man tottered along the aisle, and was about to seat himself humbly on the lower step of the pulpit stair, when the portly minister, with a glance of honest indignation on all around him, descended from the pulpit, and taking the aged mendicant by the hand, led him to his own pew, and placed him on a well-cushioned seat, beside his wife and family, to the no small discomfiture of the Misses Twaddel.